Jules Dassin/Night and the City

I interviewed Jules Dassin, still dapper and articulate, in the mid 1990s and brought along a vintage paperback copy of Night and the City, hoping I'd have the nerve to ask him to sign it. Fortunately, we got along like a house afire: Though I was much younger than he was, we both grew up in a New York that bore little resemblance to the new, improved version. So at the end of the interview I bit the bullet and handed him the movie tie-in paperback and asked.

He looked at it intently for a moment and then said, "Would you mind

if I wrote my name across Gene Tierney's creamy bosom?" And he did.

The revolution will not be televised...

Musician, poet and social activist Gil Scott-Heron died on May 27th, and while reading his obit I got hit with one of those "how'd I get that so wrong" broadsides.

I always took the signature line from Scott-Heron's 1970 spoken-word screed (contrary to what every over-stressed, culturally under-educated online writer seems to have taken at face value because someone once wrote it somewhere, Scott-Heron's legacy isn't rap -- it's the apparently spontaneous but meticulously-crafted verse of poetry slams)"The Revolution Will Not be Televised” as a defiant warning that when the poor, alienated and disenfranchised finally get up off their asses to fight the power, the carnage will be overwhelming, up against the wall motherfucker real, not some happy news kicker or an intensely manipulated, reality-tv style spectacle. Talk about prescient.

Interestingly, my husband's take was the complete opposite: He interpreted it to mean that the ruling class would suppress real reporting and spin the whole thing into insignificance… also prescient.

But I'd never listened to or read the full piece (shame on me) and it was a revelation. Yes, Scott-Heron addresses racism, police brutality, addiction and entrenched social injustice. But this excerpt sums up what really burned his ass:

“The revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox in four parts without commercial interruptions…

"The revolution will not be brought to you by the Schaefer Award Theater and will not star Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle as Julia.

"The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.

"The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.

"The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, brother."

Damn – that is more prescient than I ever imagined.

http://youtu.be/qGaoXAwl9kw